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"Hubble Women Making History"

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My name is Madison Brodnax and I'm an electrical 
power systems engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Being an electrical power systems 
engineer entails making sure everything goes  

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smoothly on the telescope, basically keeping it 
safe. Something I do every year is manage the  

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solar eclipses for the telescope to make sure 
that it can, power wise, make it through that. Me  

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and the other electrical power systems engineers 
manage any anomalies that might arise that are  

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power or electrical related or even thermal 
related. I think a lot of people think it's  

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just a telescope floating around in low Earth 
orbit, and it just kind of does its own thing,  

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but in reality there are tons of people keeping 
it safe and healthy day to day with whatever  

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problems may arise. It goes through hot seasons, 
cold seasons, there could be electrical problems  

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or pointing and control problems with it, there's 
a huge team of people that keeps that going and  

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seamless so that the public gets these really 
great images, you know, year after year.

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What I find most rewarding about the work is probably 
being able to flex my engineering brain every day.  

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I think of working on such a historic project 
that has a lot of information that needs to be  

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learned about it, back to its conceptualization all 
the way up to now in 2023, and is really like a  

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privilege and also keeps me on my feet every day. 
In my day-to-day I wake up and I pet my dog for a  

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good like 15-20 minutes. If I'm coming in office 
it's me versus 295 for a good 45 minutes. Once I  

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come in I usually get to talk with my teammates 
about the things that have been happening for  

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the past week. I really enjoy being able to 
collaborate with everybody in the mornings,  

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then I sit down and do some work, chug away at 
some more coding or some more numbers, hopefully  

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have a cool meeting and get to schmooze some other 
NASA people, and then also head home and go to the  

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gym or trivia. I think one thing to take away 
from, you know, being a woman in STEM is that  

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you're stronger and more knowledgeable than you 
think. You are the smartest person in the room,  

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all of us are the smartest person in the room, 
and I I think, you know, worrying about confidence  

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level is not as important, just showing up, flexing 
the knowledge that you know you already have is  

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really important. My favorite Hubble image is 
probably the Butterfly Nebula, it's you know,  

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one of the older ones, but I love all the pinks 
and purples in it, I think it's really pretty.

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